


Coyote Trapping

by flashrevolver



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gore, Hallucinations, M/M, Piss, Torture, Vomit, self-amputation, the mcreyes is very vague and mostly only alluded to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 05:57:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10691142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashrevolver/pseuds/flashrevolver
Summary: "The appendage doesn't feel like his anymore. It feels like a part of the clamp that's holding him there. Like an anchor. For a brief second a thought creeps into him that makes him shudder.I should cut it off."orJesse gets caught between a rock and a hard place and has to make a rough decision.





	Coyote Trapping

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my WIPs for months and I've decided to rip the bandaid off and polish it a little and post it. The part where Jesse cuts his arm off is pretty gross so if you're squicked out by gore you probably shouldn't..read it.

It's Jesse's fault. He knows it is, he isn't stupid. Well, maybe he is stupid considering he managed to get himself into this situation, but at least he knows it's his own fault. One of the first rules he was ever taught was to not go off on his own. His parents told him, then Deadlock told him, then Blackwatch told him. Hammered it into him. "You go off by yourself and you make yourself a sitting duck." It was one of those rules that went in one ear and out the other.

Those people intend to leave him here to die. They're not coming back anytime soon, and nobody knows where he is. Not even Gabe. They were on a mission, a simple one, to find out where a group of thieves were centering their operations. The stakeout had lasted for days, but Jesse had a lead. Gabriel wouldn't listen to him, though. Told him it was "not a real lead" and that it wasn't worth the risk. Jesse knew it was though, he fucking knew it, and damn if he wasn't right.

He had planned on it being a quick trip, a two hour walk, round-trip, to prove himself right. It was supposed to be a quick trip. The lead was a warehouse in the northern part of the city, and Jesse had left in the middle of the night to investigate it. He hadn't told Gabe because there was no way he'd let him go. When he'd got out of bed the other man hadn't said anything, just rolled over and continued sleeping. Jesse didn't even bother with an excuse because he planned on being back before Gabriel woke up, anyway. The walk was easy, especially with Jesse being in the best shape of his life due to Blackwatch, and finding the right warehouse in a maze of others was a little harder but still not a difficult task. He couldn't see any lights inside the building, but the door on the side was cracked. Jesse'd snuck close enough to listen before he tried to look inside, and there had been quiet. He refused to leave without some kind of proof because if he did the entire trip would be pointless and he would've disobeyed direct orders for no reason. But he knew he was right. 

He wishes he wasn't right, now, even though the prideful part of him is still reveling in it. But he knows he's really and truly fucked this time. This isn't a mistake he can undo. When he'd gotten into the warehouse it wasn't empty. There were six or seven men sitting around a table, and as soon as Jesse had stepped foot inside the darkened warehouse he'd known it was over. He'd nearly made it out the door, but was grabbed by the back of the shirt harshly and dragged back inside. They'd tied him up and asked him questions—basic "who are you and who are you working for"s—but Jesse had just spat at them in response, refusing to open his mouth for anything more than a defiant chuckle. The entire time, he'd been searching for a way out, a slip in someone's demeanor wide enough for him to fit through, but it hadn't happened. He kept digging his hole deeper, and that's what got him where he is now: pinned to a workbench, his left forearm crushed under a manual press, his stomach bleeding from a shallow stab-wound, and his face throbbing from being slapped around for about an hour straight. The men had left hours ago and told him they'd be back in the morning to try again. Jesse can't even begin to fathom the state his arm is in. He's trapped on his knees, and if he tries to stand a wave of nausea beats its way through him from the pain. 

The worst part about this whole thing, decidedly, is that he didn't tell Gabriel. He didn't tell him where the warehouse was, and he didn't tell him he was leaving. In a few hours Gabe would wake up in an empty bed and have no idea where to begin looking for him, and that's entirely Jesse's fault. 

The stab wound isn't so bad. At least, Jesse doesn't think it is. It was meant as more of a disarming move than a lethal one. He's had worse. His arm though—he doesn't even want to think about his arm. He'd screamed himself hoarse as they'd secured it under the arm of the clamp and then twisted and twisted the lever until Jesse could hear his bones cracking. It's not his shooting arm thank God, but it's still concerning. He's still got feeling in his fingers, but when he tries to move them it sends shocks of burning pain all the way up to his shoulder. He's really fucked.

~

By the time the sun rises Jesse is delirious. He can see the beams flood into the warehouse from the high windows, and he curses the light as his tired eyes have spent the last four or five or six hours staring into nearly pitch blackness. The men said they'd come back in the morning, but who knows when that means? Something about the daylight is strangely comforting, as if the dawn of a new day can erase the horrors of the night, and Jesse feels himself being lulled into sleep. He'll wake up when he hears them come in—he knows he will. He's always been a light sleeper. Just a few minutes, probably.. he falls asleep with his body slumped against the workbench.

He dreams of missions, like he nearly always does. Of moving targets, of headshots, of picking off the enemy one by one. When he wakes up slowly, blinking into the dusty room, the sun is shining in through the opposite windows. It takes him longer than to should to gain his bearings, remember where he is, remember why there's a searing pain throbbing up his arm. When he glances over at his trapped appendage he feels like ice-water has been poured down his back. His hand is a dark, twitching, swollen animal curled against the wooden surface of the workbench. His brain doesn't register it as his at first. 

They never came, Jesse realizes. It's past noon and nobody ever came through that door. He also realizes he's hungry as his stomach growls and sends a throb through the stab wound he'd completely forgotten about. He notes with no small amount of terror that it's still bleeding, but can't tell if he somehow broke the scab in his sleep or if it had never formed one thick enough to block the blood flow. 

Jesse knows how to deal with things like this. With a bit of sleep in his system he remembers that he's been trained for situations like these. It would be incredibly helpful for him to have two hands, he thinks bitterly, but sets to brainstorming regardless. He could use his shirt to tie around his waist and possibly stop his stomach from bleeding, but that would require for him to be able to take the shirt off at all. Plus, it got cold at night and it would be stupid for Jesse to be without a shirt. He settles for gathering the front of his shirt into a ball and pushing it against the wound, applying as much pressure as he can for about half an hour. When he pulls it away the bleeding seems to have slowed nearly to a stop. Now that he's relatively sure he's not going to fucking bleed to death, he knows he has to set to work on loosening the clamp. The men had taken the leverage bar out, which was a major setback, but Jesse was determined to find a way. He works for an hour trying and failing to loosen it with his fingers before he remembers the knife in his boot. The men had patted him down and taken his gun, but they hadn't touched his boots. 

It takes a bit of painful maneuvering to get his left boot off, but when he does his knife falls out onto the concrete floor with a clatter. 

"These motherfuckers," Jesse mutters to himself to break the silence as he uses the tip of his knife to try to loosen any screw he can find. There are no screwdrivers to be seen, or anything else that could possibly help him, which Jesse figures is fair and reasonable. His knife isn't doing shit, though, and when the sun starts setting again, a creeping feeling of terror sets, too. He realizes that it's been nearly twenty-four hours since he showed up here. Of course he's known nobody was coming for him, but it's still deeply unnerving that nobody's come. It's like his mind knew it but his body was barely catching on. He has to piss, he's hungry, thirsty as a motherfucker, and his stomach has started bleeding again, probably from the effort it took to get his boot off. His piss he can hold, his hunger can wait, his thirst can be ignored for a little while longer. The bleeding is concerning, though, and when Jesse looks down at himself he gets a little lightheaded at the sight of blood soaking the front of his shirt and pants. He twists a clean part of his shirt around to try and stop the bleeding again, holding it uncomfortably tight against the wound.

The hours go in cycles like this—try to unscrew the clamp, fail, sit and hold his stomach, try to unscrew the clamp, fail, sit and hold his stomach. The crying doesn't get added to the cycle until noon the next day.

It starts as screaming, just incoherent shouting until his voice snaps and he starts sobbing. He pulls up his shirt to look at his predicament and notices a sleek bruise peeking over the waistline of his pants. When he pushes the fabric away to look at it frantically he remembers that it's a hickey. A tiny bite mark on the apex of his hipbone. He presses a finger against it and shivers. Gabriel.

He wonders what Gabriel is doing now. Wonders if he's getting a search party together. If he's telling Jack to do it. For a brief moment of exhausted hopelessness he wonders if Gabriel even cares that he's gone. He feels himself drifting, whether into sleep or unconsciousness he can't be sure, so he tries to keep himself awake. He imagines Gabe's teeth on his neck and rough hands on his hips. He imagines the lip-biting and furious grinding and gripping and shoving that tends to come with them fucking. As his vision slowly melts away from him he imagines Gabriel's hands caressing him softly, soothing his pain, kissing him gently and sweetly, and he falls asleep.

~

Jesse wakes up in a panic when he hears a loud crash from outside the warehouse, eyes widened and heart racing. He sinks down when he realizes it was thunder. There's rain hitting the windows and he can't tell what time it is because there's a vague dimness surrounding the high windows. He tries instinctually to pull his left arm in toward himself and isn't shocked when it doesn't budge. He is unnerved, though, when he realizes he hadn't felt the motion at all. He straightens up and leans over the workbench to chance a look at his hand and feels bile rise in his throat. It's dead. It's the hand of a dead man, slightly bloated and paled to a sickly grey. When he sends out a command to wriggle his fingers, none of them move. Not even a twitch. 

There's a leak in the roof, and a drop of water falls onto the dirt next to him with a thump every fifteen seconds or so. His mouth is dry—his tongue like a barren sponge in the back if his throat. He's never been so thirsty in his life. He tried hard to lean over far enough to catch the rainwater in his mouth but it's just this side of out of reach. He tried pulling the workbench along the ground to get just an inch closer, but it doesn't budge. In the end, he reaches out and cups his dirty hand under it. He can just barely reach it, and it takes about a minute and a half for enough water accumulates for him to lap at, but he keeps at it until he feels less like his own tongue is going to choke him. 

It's that third night that the hallucinations start. He'd call them night terrors, but he's almost sure he's awake. They start out small—creations of his paranoia scurrying behind shelves and boxes in the warehouse. Eyes peeking at him from dark corners. They escalate, though, until it's his own body mutating. The tear in his stomach ripping until his insides are tumbling out onto his thighs and he's trying hard to sweep them inside, crying and choking. His hand, the stuck one, the reason he's still in this god fucking forsaken place, starts twitching and moving on its own as though it's trying to crawl away from him. 

He's not sure when or he snaps himself out of it or wakes up, but it's daylight again and his insides are still on the inside. His hand is still lying dead against the wooden surface of the workbench. It's concerning to him that his hand laying still is more normal to him now than it moving, but he's still relieved. The appendage doesn't feel like his anymore. It feels like a part of the clamp that's holding him there. Like an anchor. For a brief second a thought creeps into him that makes him shudder.

I should cut it off.

 

It's wrong and awful and such a horrible conviction fills him after he thinks it, but now that the seed is planted, it's there. It won't leave. Jesse tries again and again to unscrew the press, or unscrew the workbench, anything, but he can't. He breaks the tip of his knife off. 

I'm going to die here if I don't cut it off.

He pushes the thought away weakly, and turns his attention to his stomach. After three days of being ripped open, scabbing, and being ripped open again, the area around the wound is darkened with sensitive bruising, and the edges of the cut are tinged with infection. He realizes with a start that the bruise on his hip is gone. The last thing he had from Gabriel has faded from existence.

He's crying before he can stop himself, sobbing and shouting as his body jerks violently away from his left arm. He really is going to die here. It's a miracle he hasn't already. Whether it's the blood loss that finally gets him or the infection from his arm or his stomach or both. Maybe the fact that he hasn't had anything to drink but a few sips of dirty rainwater. Or maybe his mind will just give up, and drag his body with it. Looking back on it, Jesse will remember this as the moment his survival instinct really kicked in. 

Considering where the large circular disk of the press is positioned across his forearm, he decides it would be best to cut at the elbow. He won't have to worry about the bone that way. He presses his knife against the sensitive flesh on the crook of his elbow several times, hands sweating. It takes him at least half an hour to decide to make the first cut. It's shallow, and Jesse squeezes his eyes shut as he drags the knife across swiftly. For all the pain it causes, the cut is maybe two millimeters deep, and Jesse curses. He waits for a minute and catches his breath as blood seeps out of the cut and drips onto the dirt floor. He makes several more minuscule cuts like that, slicing less than a centimeter each time but having to pause for a minute between each.This isn't working his brain supplies. 

A burst of anger rises in him and he stabs the broken tip of the knife into the cut. He shouts, and immediately pulls it out, but when he examines the damage, it's a much deeper cut than he'd been making. He does it several more times, adrenaline pumping through him as he brings the knife down again and again, and then he hits something that makes his whole body tense, and drops the knife. He realizes with horror that he's pissing himself, but he can't stop. It's been days, and he's surprised this hadn't happened sooner. He grabs his knife again as his bladder empties, soaking his pants and the dirt under him. A relieved chill runs up his spine.

He tries to get a closer look at his arm, and feels queasy when he does. Blood is pouring from the wound, and his skin is pulling taught where he separated it with the blade. There's a visible muscle or nerve or something stretching across, and he figures that's what he hit because when he touches it again with the knife, it's like he's being hit in the funny-bone with a power drill. He hisses and looks away. With the knife poised directly above it, he draws in a deep breath and stabs downward. His body hums as it snaps, and he feels like he's being electrocuted. He hit bone on that swing, and shivers at the fact that he feels relieved by that. 

The end is in sight, and Jesse's heart is racing a mile a minute. His adrenaline is blurring most of the pain. With little hesitation, he brings the knife back to the wound and digs for the bone he felt previously. He finds that if he uses the knife to push back the meat of his arm he can see it. A pale, bloodied knot of bone fitted carefully against another knot of bone. The muscle around the joint is torn, twitches when he involuntarily flexes his arm. He wedges the knife between the bones and wriggled until he feels a pop. His head is spinning as he pulls his arm back and the bone separates. He's close. He's bleeding badly, he's lightheaded, he's sick to his stomach, but he's close. 

With an almost giddy swing, he stabs the dulled knife back into the wound. He can hear his flesh tearing as he hacks carelessly, can feel it when the blade scrapes against the bone. His body is screaming in pain at every swing of the knife, but he's almost finished, he's so close, he's almost got it, he's almost free. 

He's connected by nothing more than a few strips of muscle and skin when he drops the knife again, shaking so hard he can hardly breathe. With an air of chilling determination, he brings one foot out from under him to use as leverage against the workbench, and pulls. He's twisting violently, ferally as his survival instinct switches from fight to flight. Using his leg as leverage, he leans back and pushes with all his strength, feeling the skin ripping, muscle popping.

His head slams against the ground when he pulls himself free. 

He lays there for a minute, disoriented, and tries to use his left arm to hoist himself up before he realizes it's not there. He pushes himself to his knees, and just sits for a moment. His whole body hurts like hell, and it seems surreal that he can leave now. He looks down at his arm, lifts it and hisses in pain. He looks over at the workbench at when he sees his forearm still lodged there his stomach churns unexpectedly. He doubles over and heaves at the ground, stomach acid and drool falling from his lips into the bloody dirt. It's hard to lift himself back up with one arm, but he does, and then closes his eyes to steel himself. 

Stand up. You're going to die here if you don't stand up.

He does. He reaches up, uses the workbench for balance, and pulls himself up, pointedly ignoring the arm attached to it. Once he's up, the warehouse seems like a different place. It's smaller, and he's bigger. Taller than these shelves he's been between for three days. He can see the door, and he couldn't before. He realizes he should stop the bleeding of his arm, and pulls his shirt off with a struggle. It's nearly impossible to get it wrapped around, but he manages, using his teeth to help him pull a tight knot in the fabric. The walk to the door is long, and when the sunlight hits him in the face he squints against it and starts walking. 

~

He takes alleys and back roads to get back to the city's safehouse they were using as a base of operations, and it takes him twice as long to get back as it had to get there.

He goes for the back door, and knocks on it quietly and desperately, energy failing him. No answer. He knocks again, and again, and again, slumped against the door. He nearly breaks down thinking that everyone had left, that they'd gone back to base and left him. And then he hears locks clicking. 

Agent Holt answers the door with her gun drawn, and lowers it when Jesse nearly falls into the room. 

"McCree?" she says, voice full of confusion as she sweeps him into the kitchen and closes the door. Jesse doesn't have the energy to answer, just glances around warily and pushes her hand away when it touches the small of his back endearingly.

Someone else comes in the room and Jesse doesn't lift his head to see who it is, only sees uniform black boots come through the doorway.

“What the fuck?” the person asks, and it's Vargas. “Is that McCree?”

The kitchen becomes a flurry of “what happened to you?”s and “where the fuck have you been?”s and Jesse doesn't have it in him to answer. He can feel relief swarming him from finally being somewhere safe. 

He's pushing them away trying to get into the living room when he runs square into a thick chest and arms are wrapping tightly around his shoulders. He struggles weakly but then he realizes the arms are familiar, the smell his familiar. He feels Gabriel bury his face into the crook of his neck. He yelps, body burning as the man’s strong arms pull him close. Gabe pulls away quickly, grabbing Jesse by the chin and looking him over. He can see Gabe’s demeanor shift when he actually gets a good look at him.

“Stop standing there with your mouth open and get get the fucking medic in here,” Gabe barks at Vargas and Holt, and then they both start to attention and exit the room. Gabriel turns his attention to Jesse again.

“What happened to you?” he asks frantically, turning him by the shoulders to look at his arm, the blood seeping through the shirt he's got wrapped around it, the blood and piss soaking his pants, the bruised and clearly infected wound on his stomach.

“I was right,” Jesse chokes out, and he hadn't realized he was crying. Gabe is touching his face and petting his hair and Jesse can't deny the feeling of being home that he gets from the man’s careful hands. He feels his body grow heavier and he falls to his knees, grasping at Gabe’s shirt with his right hand, his left arm flailing in useless mimicry of the action. Gabriel goes down with him, and he feels himself being lifted before he finally lets his vision go black.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading. I might make myself write a sequel that tells a little bit more of this story if people seem interested.


End file.
